Daniel Janzen, Biologist

I have met very interesting people through Esther Dyson (on Wikipedia). The most recent such person is Dan Janzen as Esther encountered him at Science Foo Camp (on Wikipedia), hosted by O'Reilly and Google. Esther "captured" Dan in a most amazing photo.

Dan Janzen is a person you may want to know more about. Pick and choose from these lists:

• Wikipedia
• Faculty page at University of Pennsylvania.
• Curriculum Vitae
• Area de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), Janzen & Hallowachs & Caterpillars homepage, a web site at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Database for caterpillars homepage.
• The Rainmaker Foundation
• Freebase
  

Various Bios
Discover Life in America on Dr. Janzen

Awards

• The Crawfoord Award 1984 in ecology from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
• Bio Prof Janzen garners 'Japanese Nobel Prize' for conservation work (9/22/97) in The Daily Pennsylvanian, article by Margie Fishman.
• [Note: Many other honors and awards are listed in the Wikipedia article.]

Videos

• Daniel Janzen - Third World Conservation: It's ALL Gardening - Long Now - 81 min - Feb 27, 2006 Posted on Google Video by the Long Now Foundation. Stewart Brand on Daniel Janzen, April 4, 2004.
• 2000 Interview with Daniel Janzen, University of Pennsylvania, 27 minutes, 39 seconds. Interesting talk on his life and influences on it as well as how he has influenced the field.
• Dan Janzen in the Costa Rican rainforest, 3 minutes, 21 seconds.
• Reading the Forest - Dr. Dan Janzen, 5 minutes, 20 seconds. Well edited, informative video that shows the book, 100 Butterflies and Moths in the last shots. See links on the book in the book section below.
• A Google Tech Talk on February 26, 2008: International Bar Code of Life: Creating a searchable database of every species on earth, 1 hour, 6 minutes, 10 seconds. Google host Jonathan Rosenberg speaks with Drs. Paul Hebert and Dan Janzen. This Tech Talk was followed up with a trip to Costa Rico by Googlers (See entries under blogs below). While the video is long, it is rated high and 3,744 viewings were at least started.

Blog entries about Dr. Janzen
A group of Googlers (employees of Google) are studying how structured data can be used in a web search. In pursuit of this question, they spent some time with Dr. Janzen.

• Adam Sadovsky writes in his blog, Tmunot, about his travels with Dr. Janzen to the ACG in Costa Rica (includes photos).
• Alon Halevy writes about the trip in his blog entry, Bar Coding in Costa Rica. Alon also has 45 photos from this trip.
• In conjunction with this trip, there is a quick tour of the dormitory at the ACG (48 seconds) uploaded April 1, 2008. Googlers who went on the trip might want to see if they are in the video, "Controlled burn in the ACG" (1 minute, 44 seconds); the rest of us will be more interested in the description explaining why they were burning the field.

Articles about Dr. Janzen or his work

• Democratizing Taxonomy, in Conservation Magazine, April-June 2006 (Vol. 7, No. 2), by Marguerite Holloway.
• "Dr. Daniel H. Janzen, Honorary Fellow, ATB, 2002", March 15, 2006, Biotropica (p 482-482) by Nalini Nadkarnl. Biotropica is the journal of tropical biology and conservation.
• "From bugs to boas, Dan Janzen bags the rich coast's life" in the Smithsonian, December 1, 1986, by Don Lessem.

Books

• Longitude is a specialty book store to remember when you want information on a location. They feature Dr. Janzen's book, Costa Rican Natural History. The page also lists in a sidebar other links to the same story. Same book on site of the University of Chicago Press.
• 100 Butterflies and Moths by Jeffrey Miller, Dan Janzen, and Winifred Hallwachs, 2007, 272 pages. TextbooksRUs. Powell Books Synopsis and Reviews. Amazon. Harvard University Press. Review in Journal of Insect Conservation, Vol. 12, No. 5, October 2008, by John Tennent, The Natural History Museum, London. Alibris. New York Times Review. Review in Science News on Highbeam.

Essay or Lecture

• EarthSky: Daniel Janzen describes the human world (a excerpt from the essay, Gardenification of Wildland Nature and the Human Footprint, which link includes citations of this essay). This EarthSky excerpt is a part of a series: Fifty Scientists describe the human world.
• "Rain Forest: Use It or Lose It", an Illahee Lecture by Dan Janzen on April 3, 2000.

Books Dr. Janzen contributed to
Biodiversity and Human Health found preview editions of Google Books. This page has links to Amazon and other sources of the book and reviews.

Articles or books that mention Dr. Janzen

• Diversity among parasitic wasps is even greater than suspected e! Science News - August 29, 2008 12:14 on the topic Biology & Nature; includes a link to an audio slide show. Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Green Phoenix, 2003, by William Allen on Google books. Allen feels that the ACG will die when Janzen dies.
• Taxonomy: All living things, online. Nature 418, 362-363 (25 July 2002) | doi:10.1038/418362a. Janzen is quoted and in a picture.
• Field Guide to the Wildlife of Costa Rica, 2002, University of Texas Press. Link is to Google books with other links to book sellers and reviews.
• The Age of Ecology, the transcripts of programs broadcast between 1986 and 1990 (on Google books). Includes links to Amazon, and other book sellers.

eMail conversation with Dan Janzen
Search results on MarkMail.org for Dan Janzen.

On the eve of Halloween, a brief story about reincarnation

My father always told me that as he left the hospital after I was born, the newspaper headlines were that Franklin Roosevelt had died. He said his greatest fear was that I might be the reincarnation of Roosevelt.

So I spent much of my young life thinking that I was born on the day that Roosevelt died. I did even consider that Roosevelt might have died in the night while I was born the next morning.

At any rate, it is probably remarkable that my father, not just a scientist, but a physicist, spoke to me this way about reincarnation. It gave me a basis for considering reincarnation seriously, which I did at various times in my life, which is a topic for another day.

At some point, perhaps as a teen or in my early 20's, I decided to look up the death of Franklin Roosevelt. You can imagine my surprise to find that he did not die the day before or on my birthday. He died the day after I was born! Apparently, my father was in the hospital so long that the time merged into one day.